generating in the observer the feeling of having come
home to a place he does not consciously recall. “New
impressions, contacts and experiences enrich the work
and seem to give the artist the opportunity to create
a new home, when actually he is moving in a spiral,
returning time after time to the source … The mod­
ern artist is not striving for the new or for complete
insight, but wishes to speak of the old and the night,
in images that conceal this but, at the same time, make
it tangible”.2 This unorthodox typification of modern
– and contemporary – artwork fits the sculptor and
painter Raphaël Buedts like a glove.
Buedts’ oeuvre is characterised by the incessant
interplay between diverse forces and processes and by
the artist’s longing to get these dialectics to result in a
harmonic meeting. It is the longing for a harmony be­
tween culture and nature, form and formlessness, the
familiar and the unfamiliar. At times, it is successful ; at
others, the power struggle remains unresolved. But the

In the essay, The Secret Homecoming, Hans Theys seeks
the origins of artistic oeuvres. He attributes a central
role to the ‘way of seeing things’, a framework for
the artist’s observation. Theys describes it as a visual
rhythm, often stemming from childhood, which is
concretised by persistent association with things and
discernible in all of the artist’s works.1
Theys goes on to clarify how every successful work
of art evokes the presence of the old in a new fashion,

attempted ‘homecoming ’, the moment when every­
thing falls into place, is never permanently attained
in Buedts’ universe. The equilibrium achieved always
seems precarious and temporary.
A number of Raf Buedts’ personal references
and memories played a crucial role in the develop­
ment of his work, such as his uncle’s mill with the
impressive, ingenious triangular connections of the
roof support; the heavy charcoal-like lines on the
mill’s beams and the sensuality of the flour with
which they were covered ; the slopes of the Flemish
Ardennes in Mater, unfolding continually to the
eye in one constellation after another ; the bicycle
rides through the Waas countryside, full of ploughed
fields. The question that confronted Buedts was how

to capture such spatial experiences in two or three
dimensions.
But other personal references and recollections
were at work as well : The artist’s memory of his
mother and how, as a seamstress, she unrolled fabric
and drew patterns. This was a highly specific language,
illegible to the layman, consisting of various unbroken
and dotted coloured lines, looking almost like a form
of cartography, a drawing system for transferring the
three-dimensional to flat paper. It was not an existing
reality that was being mapped here, however, but
a new space laid out in the imagination.
And finally, there was the nocturnal, elusive
world under the tabletop, which Buedts continu­
ally perceived and portrayed as oval. That oval is

A Fragile Shelter

perhaps the central motif in his drawn, sculpted and
painted oeuvre.

43

and sturdily built. These ‘furniture things’ consti­
tuted the culmination (and end) of Buedts’ furniture
making. The pieces were still functional, but at the
same time possessed a marked poetic charge. Buedts
played an ingenious game on the border between
heteronomy and autonomy, furniture and art. With
a few modest but efficient inter­ventions, the artist
was extending a hand to the animal kingdom. Furniture for a Bird had appeared earlier in extremely sim­
ple, linear drawings between 1970 and 1980. Twelve
of these drawings, grouped on a sheet, constitute
an elementary graphic voca­bulary, moving in steady,
sure pencil lines between symbol, drawing and
(a representation of) sculpture. Below every draw­
ing is a word, like an old elementary school picture,
in which the pact between word, image and thing is
sealed for the first time.
For his contribution to the Chambres d’Amis exhibi­
tion, Buedts also placed a number of small sculptures
inside the house. Instead of demanding attention,

Raphaël Buedts’ career proceeded in a number of
separate phases. Between 1971 and 1985, he produced
furniture. Initially, his pieces appeared to be more
or less functional, but gradually they became more
autonomous. A catalogue from 1991, entitled Furniture Things, provides a full overview of this part of his
work 3 (a facsimile of the book has been incorporated as
an integral part of this publication).
The second phase in Buedts’ artistic life was
heralded in 1986, when Jan Hoet selected him for the
illustrious exhibition, Chambres d’Amis, in which artists
exhibited works in private homes in Ghent. Buedts
was able to indulge himself in an environment that
suited him down to the ground : the day-to-day home
interior. The exhibition was a turning point in his
artistic development.
In the garden just outside the protective interior of
a Ghent family house, he set up Furniture for a Bird :
constructions fabricated from branches, seemingly
elementary and fragile but nevertheless ingeniously

3. Raphaël Buedts. Meubeldingen [Furniture Things], Dirk De Vos, ed., catalogue to
the exhibition in Plateau, Brussels, 16 November to 20 December 1991.

they blended into its interior. That way, although
the private atmosphere of the house was not affected,
the sculptures subtly addressed those visitors with a
patient and attentive eye for detail. Jan Hoet was not
happy with the contribution and expressed strong
criticism. This was a blow to the artist and had an
impact on the further evolution of his work.
In the years that followed, Raf Buedts left the fur­
niture behind him, and the majority of his sculptures
became strictly autonomous. His sculpting production

diminished drastically, however. In the early 1990 s,
Buedts experimented with plaster and bronze,
without either becoming a substantial part of his
oeuvre. By the mid -1990 s, his sculpting activities
virtually ceased.
In the meantime, Buedts had started painting. In
the works from that period, he portrayed his daily
environment through an image language that was far
more figurative than either his sculptures or the bulk of
his drawings. The colours were sometimes dull brown,

A Fragile Shelter

47

green, grey or black ; sometimes glaring yellow or
pinkish ; they were never appealing. The same goes
for the composition and proportions : These images
are oppressive. In an essay from 1999, Eric Bracke
referred to a slightly similar, conscious recalcitrance
in the work of the American painters Philip Guston,
Ben Nicholson and, in particular, Milton Avery.4
A motif that already appeared very early in the
drawings gained the upper hand in the paintings : the
curl, or curling weed. This sometimes adds a cheerful
touch to the whole, creating a generally strong dynamic
that appears to end in obsession or chaos. In that aspect,
the artist referred to the motion in Van Gogh’s paint­
ings. He also talked of the silly as a weapon against the
risk of a purely dexterous or expertly painted image.
Buedts used to say that he sculpted with the eye
of a painter. In any event, observation plays a central
role in numerous of his sculptures, drawings and
paintings. The influence of Roger Raveel is clearly
noticeable where that aspect of his work is concerned,
as is the prominent role of the everyday. In comparison
with the drawings and sculptures, the paintings from
this period vary in quality.

At the end of 1990, the painter attached pieces of
wood to a canvas. Before he knew it, he was back to
sculpting. In 1999, he stopped painting and started
sculpting in a rhythm that was to systematically
increase in intensity up until his death. In most cases,
the sculptures were autonomous, though a series of
benches and a collection of painters’ easels harked
back to the earlier furniture.
From 2008 onwards, whenever the artist lacked
the strength to sculpt, he took up painting again. This
time, however, his paintings demonstrated the same
sense of abstraction and of the sometimes powerful
and vigorous, sometimes searching, sensitive lines of
the drawings and sculptures.
Although Buedts had alternating periods of
sculpting and painting in his career, drawing was a
continuous activity from start to finish. In the sculp­
tures, the drawings and the late paintings, the artist
attached a great deal of importance to line, to the way
it was placed or the context in which it appeared. Par­
allel with the evolution of his sculpting, the constructive
4. Eric Bracke, Posthotel, (Wetteren: Paul De Moor, 1999), p. 25-28.

line began to lose importance over time and the freer,
lyrical line gained prominence.
Words occasionally crop up in Buedts’drawings.
The most common, perhaps, is zelfkant, meaning
‘selvedge ’, ‘fringe’ or ‘border’. In the sense of ‘fringe’
it is generally used for the fringes of society. The first,
original meaning of the word, however, refers to the
generally reinforced woven edges of a textile.
In this context, in the essay Frontiers of Utopia, the
French semiologist Louis Marin explores the meaning
of the French word, lisière, which also translates as
‘selvedge ’, ‘fringe’ or ‘border’ : “a term used for both
the edge of a textile and the edge of a wood or village.
This term no longer signifies a route, but rather a
no-man’s land. The lisière is the space of a gap, but

uncertain of its limits, as when a land, an estate, a
forest have simply their own edge, with no other limit
in front, just a wild or an undetermined place”.5
Raf Buedts fostered a fascination with the unde­
termined place in the twilight zone under the table.
His very first three-dimensional creation was a ‘circlesquare’ table (Vici-table, 1971), the top of which could
take on the shape of either a square or a circle. It always
served as a dining table at Buedts’ home.
By the artist’s own account, he started creating
furniture because he had no money to buy any.
According to Marco Meneguzzo, the choice, as artist,
5. Louis Marin, ‘Frontiers of Utopia’, in Utopias and the Millennium, K. Kumar and
S. Bann, eds., (London : Reaktion Books, 1993).

A Fragile Shelter

to make furniture instead of autonomous creations
was existential rather than ideological in Buedts’ case.
That doesn’t diminish the political scope and impact
of this literal and figurative artistic orientation.
The table in question features in quite a lot of draw­
ings, paintings and sculptures. It always appears to­
gether with its twilight zone. Beneath the table’s edge,
a formless mass of ‘curl weeds’ grows rampant ; in the
sculptures, we find the twilight zone in a chaotic col­
lection of facets scooped out of the wood with a chisel.

49

Such works demonstrate a confrontation between
form and formlessness, geometry and chaos, line and
mass. It is illustrative of an oeuvre in which the various
forms of expression present themselves time and again
as the provisional end result of an interplay between
various – sometimes opposing – forces or processes.
These dialectics form the core of Buedts’ artistry.
The most important interplay is that between
drawing and sculpting, which in itself already assumes
quite a few different capacities.

Buedts drew on the wood itself, for example. A
major example of this would be his painters’ easels.
The first easel dates from 1980, but another new series
was created in 2008. What makes these easels special is
that their construction is both simple and ingenious.
The easels are often sawed from a single beam. Al­
though they may look rickety, they are actually perfectly
stable. Their function as an art support by no means
inhibits their autonomous sculptural qualities. In their
constructive logic and three-dimensional effect, they are
reminiscent of Furniture for a Bird, with the difference
that they are made of beams rather than branches.
On the sawed surfaces of the beam are traces of
drawing : black wax-crayon lines sawed down the
middle of the piece. Such details are reminiscent
of the systematic, accurate work of carpenters on a
building site. The same kind of construction lines
can be found in his autonomous sculptures as chalk
or pencil lines made prior to sculpting.
A number of Buedts’ easels are also marked with
painted white lines, some in a zigzag pattern (like
that of a triangular connection in a wooden or metal
construction). Those lines, too, betray great accuracy,

Frank Maes

even if it is of a slightly more intuitive nature. Buedts
claimed that such painted marking creates distance
from the material on which it is placed, lending the
surface an erotic tension.
A similar tension is created when geometric figures
– ellipses and diamonds, in particular, but also squares,
circles and parabolas – are drawn on the often irregularlyshaped sculptures. The ellipse and the oval appear
most frequently. They can refer to the aforementioned
‘circle-square’ table, as well as to the eye, to a little oval
window from Buedts’ memory, to an egg or Brancusi’s
famous egg-shaped sculpture and to the cross-section
of a sturdy branch.
The ellipse is a geometric figure that – unlike the
circle or square, for example – is not static or built up
around one central point. Due to its two centres, an
ellipse is essentially multiple and in motion.
Buedts often drew the two axes of the ellipse, which
together form a cross. He also made a series of cross
sculptures in the form of small reliefs in wood or plaster.
They hang between the second and third dimensions,
between form and matter, appearing and disappearing.
The cross also often functions as a connection between

The Roman author Plinius distinguished between three
kinds of sculpture : plastica, scultura and fusoria. Plastica
is modelling in clay, scultura sculpting in stone or wood
and fusoria casting in bronze. Rodin came at the end of
the tradition where the human figure for the last time
adopts a heroic pose in its posture and movement in
space. Constructivism strips sculpture of its pathos as
expressed in marble and bronze and uses industrial
techniques. In the future, the sculptor will compose
from separate elements, constructing like an engineer,
arranging, combining, assembling and grouping. The
sculpture will leave its pedestal and merge with it to
immerse itself in reality as a thing amongst things.
The art of Raphaël Buedts continues this dialogue
between sculptor and material. Working in the tradi­
tional way, Buedts created an inner bond with the ma­
terial. Skill assumes application and dedication, which,
at the same time, are part of the work and of the urge.1
Wood
Buedts’ work is characterised by an intimate explora­
tion of wood. His sculptures and pieces of furniture

display a similar fascination with its specific properties
and the artist seeks an optimal application and use for
its different types. The core of the realisation process is
the working of the wood into volumes, surfaces, beams,
planks and slats. The sculptures put the observer’s logic
and power of perception to the test, as they contrarily
evade any simple or unambiguous interpretation.
For Buedts, working wood is a way of being. It is
counting the growth rings, feeling the bark, accepting
the unevennesses and the grain, smelling the scent,
examining the colour, lifting it up and putting it down,
seeking the branch and the bifurcation and bearing the
damage. The artist positions himself in wood.
Buedts expresses himself in a fundamental
confront­ation between man and object, man and
fellow man, man and the tangible environment. The
artist progresses through many stages before evolving
into a maker. First of all, he is a meditative observer
of nature and landscape. Contemplating nature and
landscape means being open to and allowing yourself
to be permeated with impressions and experiences.
The fringe of a spinney, a stubbly cornfield, a ploughed
acre with heavy clods of earth, a green water meadow,

a fallen tree : These are vital conditions for the artist’s
wellbeing.
What determined the choice of wood was the mill he
regularly visited as a child. The interior of the mill was
constructed from a dominant wooden truss with heavy
posts and imposing cross beams. The space folded
inwards and was structured by the alternating rhythm
of the beams and the open storeys. Its warm intimacy
evoked associations for the young Buedts of a bird’s
nest, which at the same time became the workshop and
the imagined space. The old, weather-beaten, breathing
wood induced daydreaming. The mill was the womb
and the absolute intimacy Buedts was to seek all his life.

Restlessness
The wood has a soul, a heart of hearts, an intriguing
secret. Empathy generates images. Buedts saws and
chisels his way to the heart of the wood. Sawing comes
1. The descriptive character of this text does not indicate distance, isolation
or restriction. Rather, it is an encircling of a process and the acceptance of the
sculpture ‘being so’. The text is a description of a subject that is literally in
front of you. Describing is equal to the ‘back to brass tacks’ of phenomenology,
by means of which criticism of the alienation of Man was once formulated.

Raphaël Buedts : The Stairway to the Heart

before chiselling, cutting, chopping, gouging, notching,
grooving, carving, splitting and cleaving. The sawing
produces pillars and posts, stanchions and trunks that
are dominant in the global compositions, although
tipped, truncated and shifted. A subdued insolence is
concealed in the saw cuts, gouges and scratches. Open­
ings and cavities allude to physical and mental pain.
On the other hand, sculpting as a practice remedies
the lasting doubt and the agonising self-torture.
Sculpting demands a laborious autonomy and

101

slowly and intensely evokes a sculpture with intimate,
spiritual claims.
Confrontation with the sculptures creates the im­
pression of unfathomability and independence. Despite
the manhandling and the inimitable manipulations,
Buedts is no self-proclaimed, nihilistic iconoclast.
Instead of allowing himself to be swayed by the trends
of the moment, he chooses a profession with centuriesold rules. Even if only to go against convention with
an anarchistic, reckless love of work.

Tree
The tree is the symbol of life in numerous cultures.
Trees appear to be like products of nature. And yet,
historically and phenomenologically speaking, they
are always unique. As with fruits and the products
derived from them (such as wine), each tree has
its own organic cell structure, determined by the
variety, the climate in which it grows and the soil
that feeds it. This results in a specific scent, colour
and texture.
Man is like a tree : we stand with our feet in
the dark earth and our body turns to the light.
The tree is therefore pregnant with human
subjectivity.2
A tree is the tree of life and the tree of know­
ledge, so says Jewish-Christian mythological
tradition. Our theories, our concepts and language,
our consciousness and the cultural codes of society
influence our knowledge of nature. It is therefore
not enough to associate Buedts’ work superficially
with the gnarled crowns of pruned pollard willows ;
his works are too imbedded in a personal way of
sculpting and designing.

Wim Van Mulders

Development
The artist prefers to work with oak, chestnut, white
poplar, azobe, ash, walnut and willow, due to their
specific expressive features. The wood warps, shrinks,
swells, moulders, splits, twists, distorts. The sculptures
therefore split, crack and cleave, exhibiting a threaten­
ing temporality. The sculpture displays its develop­
ment : This is its history and its destiny. The choice of
profession indicates care and precision. Nevertheless,
a motivated craftsman such as Buedts realises how
uncontrollable his material remains. Light penetrates
into grooves and folds, showing how a sculpture is
subject to changing light and atmospheric turbulences.
The dramatic contrast of light and shade directs its
visual expression. Buedts seeks conflict by wounding

2. See Léonne Van der Weegen : “Der Baum, so ein wunderschöner Baum. Over
bomen, troost, jaloezie en schuld”, Streven, February 2009, p. 140 - 48. The author
provides insight into the significance of a horse chestnut tree in the awakening
love of Anne Frank in the Secret Annex. Jorge Semprun, as a prisoner in Buchen­
wald, watches in fascination a lonely beech that proved to be the tree beneath
which Goethe and his secretary Eckermann held their conversations. The
knowledge of this fact saves Semprun from death. Van der Weegen shows that
the tree, in its invincibility, is always a silent witness to human vulnerability.

the wood, turning the sculptures into dramatis personae.
The fold crystallises the abyss – so near and yet so
far – over which the artist bends without disappearing
into it himself.
The sinister nature of the sculptures nevertheless
shows an attempt to offer a haven and home for an un­
satisfied longing and an oppressive feeling of alienation.
Typical of the sculptures is that they literally don’t
reach great heights. Their rather stocky presence invites
the observer to examine what is nearby. We get right
up close and hesitatingly familiarise ourselves with the
object. He doesn’t choose imposing dimensions, as small
and large have little to do with monumentality. Human
proportions compel concentrated observation. We are
obliged to walk around, as we can’t pick the work up.
We can only dream of appropriation.
Sculptures are given titles such as Cloud, Heaven,
Crib, Birds, Tree, Well, L adder, Trousers and Mater. The
names of the sculptures are their faces. Strung together,
the titles evoke Dadaistic poems, as they stem from the
same radical spontaneity, with its playful and serious
turns. The explicit titles don’t coincide with the thing,
as all linguistic descriptions are ambiguous. This

creates a dark shadow between the reality of the thing
and the language, with its failure and inadequacy.

Sensuality
There is an element of criticism in Buedts’ works of
the absence of sensuality in recent art. In the core of
many productions nestles a post- conceptual theory in
which tactics and strategy guide the interpretation.
In his multimedia work, a ground-breaking ambition
constantly recurs, though it is only possible to test the
borders for their elasticity. There are always borders
within borders, incidentally, borders outside borders,
etc. Buedts offers no theoretical foundation. The titles
are precise, clear and explicit. Nevertheless, they pro­
vide hardly any foothold for interpretation.
Buedts’ basic work clears the field of vision by
seeking the form behind the forms. The form visualises
that which remains unutterable. “No man understands
sensual language yet, but the birds of the air and the
beasts of the woods do, each according to its kind. Man
can therefore contemplate that of which he has been
robbed,” wrote the 17 th-century mystic and philoso­
pher Jacob Boehme.

112

Kinship
Buedts’ work appears in the light of modern sculpture,
yet harks back to sculptures from various civilisations.
One discovers similarities with the problems of
pedestal and sculpture addressed by Constantin
Brancusi. The neutral pedestal disturbs Brancusi’s
idea of unity and totality. Pedestal and sculpture
are too much plus and minus, positive and negative.
Geometricising wooden pedestals contrast sharply
with the refined sculptures in marble and bronze. The
inventiveness of the pedestals is so crucial that they
become creations in themselves. The contrast between
the wooden bases and the polished sculptures is elimi­
nated by developing each element further .3
Buedts’ work appears to be pervaded with a dichot­
omy between furniture-like pedestals and the scrawny
volumes atop them. This discord is resolved by making
no specific distinction between pedestal and sculpture
at the level of either observation, construction or appre­
ciation. The pedestals are completely integrated sculp­
tural forms that, in the eye of the artist, merge into what
is placed on top, adjacent, behind and in between. He
places a solid, closed block on a low bench, for instance,

Wim Van Mulders

and links the two by applying subtle traces of paint.
The symbiosis of open and closed, transparent and
solid guides the interpretation of the hybrid work.
Brancusi developed an ‘endless pillar’ from the
wood sculpture. The thirty-metre-high pillar refers to
the axis mundi and symbolises a modern totem pole
with the mythical totems missing, as the demythifica­
tion of the modern was complete at that moment.
With his twelve-metre-long Alberi (trees), another
sculptor, Giuseppe Penone, provided an answer to
Brancusi’s ‘endless pillar’. From rectangular wooden
beams, Penone cuts the whimsical life form from a tree
by peeling off its growth rings. The shape of the tree
when it was younger is brought to light. “Every year,
the tree is reborn and stores the memories of its being
a tree in itself ”, says Penone.4 Buedts, in turn, accentu­
ated the plastic growth character and fluid of the tree
by integrating naked trunks into a ‘living form’. In his
3. Constantin Brancusi, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1995. The Essence of Things.
Constantin Brancusi, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2004 ;
Tate Modern, London, 2004.
4. Germano Celant, Giuseppe Penone, (Milan : Electa, 1989) and Giuseppe Penone :
Sculture di Linfa, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 2007.

sculptures, the obtrusive shape of the tree disappears
to make way for a personal transformation and frag­
mentation of the subject.
Both Buedts and Penone are known for delving
the core of the tree, for showing that they discover an
essence, but Buedts sculpted the soul, or rather the
crack in the soul. With his analytical method, Penone
is diametrically opposite Buedts.
As a friend, the luckless architect / artist René
Heyvaert was of greater importance to Buedts.
Heyvaert saw the self-evidence of his objects – which
owe their form to the nature of wood, paper and card­
board – as the expression of the cosmic force that he
was. The willow twigs stripped of their bark, the sawed
tree trunks, the branches and sticks Heyvaert placed
against the front of his house, the reduction of a tree
to one branch : it is a practice that did not pass Buedts
by. Both artists expressed themselves through intimate
action drawn from the movements of the body and in
nature. Heyvaert’s fanciful branches led on to Buedts’
Furniture for a Bird pieces, with their poetical, instru­
mental references. Of Heyvaert’s experiments with the
assemblages of willow branches, Lieve Laporte writes :

This prosthesis [Untitled, 1976] attempts to
improve on and, at the same time, assimilate the
design of nature … This ‘super branch’ contains
the key to René Heyvaert’s vocabulary and can
be interpreted as a metaphor for the division
between life and stylised life, between emotions
and language, between reality and representation.
On the one hand there is the shape of the branch,
with all its subtleties and, on the other, the repre­
sentation of the branch stylised in such a way that
its features are reduced to the essential.5

5. In René Heyvaert, Nico Dockx, Lieve Laporte and Jan Mast, eds. (Ghent :
Ludion, 2006), p. 182. Daniel Vander Gucht writes in ‘Iedereen op scène’, in the
catalogue for Un-Scene (Brussels : Wiels, 2008), p. 91 : “The label of contemporary
art is even the result of an extraordinarily competitive system of selections,
exclusion, and classification of those involved and of works of art claiming the
designation ‘contemporary art’ ”. Buedts identified with René Heyvaert in the
negation and rejection of their work by the ‘artistic scene’ in a certain period.

The work of Buedts and Heyvaert possesses a contem­
plative dimension. The modest, fragile character of
their work allows them to visualise the roots of exist­
ence in rude fragments.

Raphaël Buedts : The Stairway to the Heart

Bernd Lohaus is a kindred spirit and comrade-inarms. “I love wood,” says Lohaus. “The rustic aspect
is inherent, like my being German and my somewhat
romantic temperament. Wood possesses a certain
warmth and I hardly ever hurt myself when working
it. The others get splinters in their fingers, I don’t ”. 6
This demonstrates an organic, harmonious and quasimystical relationship between artist and material.
Lohaus’ monumental work with beams focuses on
a space that is unfolded and offered. The ground and
space-related sculptures structure the environment.
The weight and mass introduce associations with
physical pressure and physical burdens.
Totem
Buedts allows the space to pervade the tectonic nature
of the result. He delves into wood, while Lohaus
orchestrates space. For Buedts, the outside world is
there to provide his sculpture with the right to exist
as a totem. Buedts’ totem is not so much a founder
and guardian spirit for the community, but focuses on
a personal component of rebellion in a veiled form.
The totem that regulates artistic order and law exists

115

in an internal division. In Buedts’ totem, social law is
not binding.
L adder (2006) is a leaning beam, measured off with
chalk marks. This piece is inspired by the work of the
artist’s mother who, as a seamstress, accurately marked
out dimensions on a piece of clothing with chalk
stripes. In recent drawings and sculptures, the sewing
pattern as a theme recurs in various forms. In its posi­
tion and angling, the big rectangular beam of L adder
refers to the totem pole as a regulating, purifying
author­ity. To stabilise the chalked-off beam, Buedts
places a wedge underneath. The wedges and pins al­
lude to the unstable-stable contrast and its inherent
dynamics. The accidentals in the sculptures and their
correction with wedge or pin correspond with the
accentuation of gravity and various bodily postures.
From Michelangelo, Buedts knows that sculpting
implies removing, eliminating and cutting away until
a core is revealed. There is the wrestling, the slinking
round the trunk, the weighing up of possibilities, the
drawing that indicates where the cuts are to be made.
6. In Bernd Lohaus (Antwerp : MuHKA, 1996), p. 73.

an internal cohesion. What such an ‘organic’ work of
art expresses is nothing other than self-perpetuating
productivity .7 Buedts’ work refers to the Romantic
Waldeinsamkeit, or ‘forest solitude’, in which nature
dominates as an untameable wilderness. The dark
side of nature exhibits a facet in which the cherishing,
curative alliance between Man and nature turns into
its antithesis. The more disorienting, pessimistic dark
side conveys the fear of absolute solitude that, ulti­
mately, is the fear of death.

Buedts examines Man’s place in nature, which is not
founded on a predetermined harmony. Blindness to the
differentness of art was seen by the Romantics as the
basic cause of the crisis in culture. This idea nestles in
Buedts’ actions and thoughts. He has a deep uneasiness
about and aversion to the rapid change of seasons in
the conformist culture industry.
7. For a philosophical description of Romanticism, see Frank Vande Veire, Als in een
donkere spiegel. De kunst in de moderne filosofie (SUN, Amsterdam, 2002), p. 61- 92.

122

In the use of his tools, the artist subconsciously
refers to the child whittling a twig with his penknife,
carving figures that provide a solid form for daydream­
ing. Buedts is a lucid romantic, free of any Schwärmerei
(rapture) or rhetoric, remaining as he does within the
walls of an internal humility.
Art & Furniture
Buedts gained fame with the furniture-like construc­
tions he called ‘furniture things’. On closer inspection
of these furniture things, Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue
Chair (1923) can be seen as an iconic artefact.8 The
famous chair, of which an unpainted prototype already
existed in 1918, was an attempt to find an answer to
the question of the place sculpture could occupy in the
new, modern interior. The effect of Rietveld’s chair was
enormous, as if no one had ever made a chair before.
Its essence is the breaking up of a closed volume with
supporting horizontal and vertical ribs that virtually
continue into infinity. The unpainted, rough-looking
prototype of 1918 served as a reference point for Buedts.
The structural ambivalence and the surprising and
entirely new dimension of Rietveld’s chair – more sculp­

Wim Van Mulders

ture than furniture – is also a recurring feature of the
furniture objects. The furniture objects resemble wornout, battered furniture with a bizarre, contrary function­
ality. They constitute a whimsical answer to Mies van
der Rohe’s statement that “function determines form”.
Buedts built tables, chairs, pianos, desks and
benches in a fanciful manner. You will also find wooden
couches in Brancusi’s work, which were used in the
studio. For Brancusi, the functional objects were of
equal value to the sculptures, as they had a common
commitment and inspiration. Buedts was no different.
The changing utility of the furniture objects – some­
times they invite you to sit, at others they are objects
of art that ultimately demand a strange distance –
poses many riddles to the observer.
This problem in the oeuvre can be found in the
debate that took place in the early 20 th century. Gerrit
Rietveld and Adolf Loos before him were convinced
that a new, revolutionary vision of ‘sitting’ was required.
Adolf Loos wrote that the technique of sitting had
changed significantly over the centuries. These days,
8. Peter Vöge, The Complete Rietveld Furniture, (Rotterdam : 010, 1993), p. 17.

we demand of a chair that we not only be able to ‘rest’
in it, but – due to the transition from physical work to
mental work – that we can also be ‘active’ in it. The piece
of furniture should feel comfortable to one’s bottom,
which should be able to rely on a welcoming support.
Sitting enjoyed the attention of the American artist
and sceptical empiricist Donald Judd.9 According to
Judd, the ideal height for a chair seat was fifty centime­
tres. At that height, his radical argument ran, sitting was
comfortable for everyone. In furniture, Man is still the
measure of all things. The furniture objects appear to be
thrown together with a dash of playful intuition. Never­
theless, they are the constructions of an unorthodox geo­
metrician – Euclidian or non-Euclidian – who opts for
improvisation rather than sterile geometrical accuracy.

Furniture for a Bird
In 1985, Buedts published Furniture for a Bird. The
book includes fifteen reproductions of charcoal draw­
ings. Beneath each drawing is a concept. Buedts writes
and draws : ‘hedge’, ‘table’, ‘stillborn’, ‘incline’, ‘bird’,
‘span’, ‘engine’, ‘depend (wimp)’, ‘seat’, ‘tent’, ‘oblique’,
‘side wind’, ‘ladder’, ‘hour’, ‘lean’. The lines of the
drawings are broad, grainy and geometric. Word and
image pervade one another in their complementary
simplicity.
Birds’ postures and their attributes are stilled into
a Zen-like movement of the hand. Furniture for a Bird
9. Donald Judd Furniture : Retrospective, (Rotterdam : Museum Boijmans Van
Beuningen, 1993).

124

Wim Van Mulders

accommodates the bird. The bird inhabits it but, at
the same time, doesn’t live in it. The elementary con­
structions show the place where the being of the bird
ranges. The structures are dwellings and instruments
of the closeness and distance of the bird : It flies unerr­
ingly beneath a vaulted sky. The enigmatic Furniture
for a Bird stands at the fringe of a mysterious world
for which every description pales into insignificance.
In Orlando, Virginia Woolf evokes the absurd image of
the snapping, cackling talking bird because her char­
acters are stranded in despair and incomprehension :
“Life ! Life ! Life ! the bird calls, as if understanding
it .” The furniture suggests the movements of birds,
which, paradoxically, hang frozen in the air.
Furniture For a Bird was executed in 1986 for
Ghent’s Chambres d’Amis exhibition, where it unfor­
tunately didn’t receive the appreciation it deserved.
It consisted solely of branches, without a single
screw or nail. The branch sculptures folded in
and towards the public space and lived in absolute
temporality.
As was intended, the artist destroyed all the works
after the exhibition.

Houtaarde
One of the highlights of the long-time collaboration
between the poet Roland Jooris and Raf Buedts was
the bibliophilic publication Houtaarde [Wood Earth].10
The meticulously executed book contains five wood­
cuts and five poems.

Like an instinct
nosing
through wood earth
like a splinter
lighting
its painful flame
like a sharpness
touching his skin
in the shavings

10. Raphaël Buedts and Roland Jooris, Houtaarde, (Ghent : Octave de Achtste
and Ergo Pers, 2000). Houtaarde was published in a run of forty-eight copies,
each of which was signed by the authors.

Raphaël Buedts : The Stairway to the Heart

something that whines
and scratches
and licks its wounds
outside
like a crack in the door
that he overhears
The poem typifies the nocturnal, disquieting atmo­
sphere of the woodcuts. In two of the woodcuts, Buedts
draws the crown of a tree, evoking the organic growth
with a stiff, spiky technique. In the three other wood­
cuts, the organic, globular composition makes way for
an abstract chaos. They are dark black prints of a fright­
ening strangeness. The constructions justify themselves
to nothing but themselves. The numerous crude lines
and curls originate from the woodchips that integrate
themselves directly into the design when they are cut
away. Practice and chance determine the drawing.
The woodcuts contrast with the heritage of the
great woodcutter Frans Masereel, as Buedts radically
excludes the narrative. The result is what Nietzsche
would call the ‘art of fascinating chaos’.

Den Bouw
When, in 2009, Buedts drew straight onto the
white walls in the Den Bouw gallery, the ‘brooding
twilight’ (as Roland Jooris put it), disappeared and
he discovered the multidimensional simultaneity
of observation in semi-classical, tender composi­
tions. The closeness, the roof supports and the
intimacy of the shed where the painting-like
drawings were applied harks back to the mill that
evoked the warmth of the womb. Buedts appears
to be coming home, achieving an extraordinary
serenity and clarity in the frescos. The material
conditions of drawing and painting emphasise a
space that has long since ceased to be neutral.
The environment was exhibited in a similar way
to Furniture for a Bird during Chambres d’Amis. By
working ‘on the spot’, the artist undermines the
concept of the auratic object and introduces the
small shed as a monumental sculpture. He throws
us back to the here and now, focusing attention
on the space available, which is not generally
acknowledged as an artistic subject.

Easel
For the Studio in the L andscape project, Buedts produced
life-size easels that enter into a confrontation with the
poems of Roland Jooris, who served as a ‘landscape
poet’ for the occasion. The easels correspond with the
structure and function of the classic painter’s easel. At
the same time, they distance themselves from them
through an inimitable usurpation of the original. Three
poles lean together, spreading their legs in the grass.
Where the poles intersect, the artist marks them with a
zigzag line, a dotted line or a thick brushstroke. Buedts
placed a rectangular or square plane on them at eye
level. Easel and painting fuse into a totem-like object.
They are erected images, dominating and subsiding
like living figures in the landscape. They indicate the
place of the erection and production of art. Here, the
personal universe is conceived. The painter’s easel
is inspiration incarnate. It is the latrine, guillotine or
throne of salvation.

127

paraphrasing, appropriation and comment dominate,
Buedts strives for beauty. Beauty disappeared almost
entirely in the iconoclasms of the 20 th century.
Throughout the ages, the Greek idea of truth and
beauty has been a standard and measure. The Greeks
admired the beauty of the sensually perceptible world.
Their admiration was not of the extraordinary, but of
the everyday and the familiar. The beautiful, the good
and the true reflect each other, signifying the fullness
of being.11
With the introduction of the subconscious, we re­
valued the instantaneous, the unstable, the chaotic,
the immeasurable and the imperfect. The link between
the beautiful, the good, and the true was broken for
good. What remains is a dislocation of old concepts and
the introduction of categories such as the absolutely
modern, the original, the innovative, the break with
tradition that becomes a tradition in itself and so forth.
Nevertheless, Buedts believed in beauty as a
usable concept for his work. René Heyvaert also

Beauty
In a time when the importance of repetition, rephotographing, re-enactment, parody, quotation,

as Bernardus van Clairvaux expresses it in his
Sermones : “One learns far more in the woods than
from books ; the trees and the rocks teach you things
you would not be able to hear elsewhere”.
Conclusion
When I met Raf Buedts in the mid -1980 s, during
the adjudication of sculptors at the Ghent Academy,
I found him a quiet, introverted man. His observation
was sharp, but his comments sparse. His judgement
sounded hard and firm, without him being banal,
or doubting the sincerity of the submissions.

Buedts’ extraordinary, intimate sculptures reflect
the singularity of the man and his evolving insight. In
seeking a valid foundation for art, he offered a concrete
mental space – like a stairway to the heart – in which a
breathless stillness reigns.

Furniture Things
“hi chair next to the table”, says Marc
in Paul van Ostaijen’s poem, “Marc
Greets Things in the Morning.” It
couldn’t be simpler or more direct, but
anyone able to rediscover and admire
things stripped of all ballast in such a
way has to leave much behind. He has
to acquire the ability to stand detached
and naked in the world.
I’m always reminded of Van Ostaijen’s
poem when I see a piece of furniture
by Raf Buedts. His chair and table
behave in the room in as bald, elemen­
tary and rudimentary a fashion as the
words in that poem. They bear witness
to the conscious will to start all over
again based on a hard-earned lack of
inhibition. It is the tale of the child
who, one day, stops looking at his ex­
pensive, almost real toys and walks into
the field, picks up a stick and from that
stick makes his irreplaceable weapon,
the weapon of his imagination, the
weapon of his inner wealth, the
weapon with which one feels strong
enough to go one’s own, individual
way, free from a society focused on
prestige and standing. It is the story of
an art that developed of its own neces­
sity, from the need to survive with the
things that are their own observation.
It is a story that bears no equilibrium,
a story of building and destroying, of
harmony that vacillates in every ticking,
threatening moment. It is a story of
humble pride in self-imposed exile.
It has kept something to itself, autobio­
graphically, Raf Buedts’ furniture. It
has taken its leave. Of the imposed ru­
les of furniture. Of what was dictated.
Of the years when one person, then
another, then yet another said, “This is
art, this is the framework, the frame­
work within which is worked, this is
beauty.”
The past they acknowledge is not
a pressing weight, but a natural
presence.

189

They express no nostalgia, but rather a
longing for confirmation in ever-lasting
confusion.
I read their titles : Cradle High Chair
Bedside Table Spoon Table with
Flowers Snip-Spoon Painter’s
Easel Hat Stand Sitting Block
Incline Lean Oblique Side Wind.
How do I address them ?
We are furniture, they say.
We are things, they say.
I am a piece of furniture, thinks the
sad thing.
I am a thing, thinks the sad piece of
furniture.
So call us furniture things, they ask.
A mumbling elusiveness lies in that
name, which is so much our own.
Something tautological, too. We are so
occupied with ourselves, in ourselves.
We are so useful when we are useless.
And actually, what we would like most
is to be relieved of our function and
simply be allowed to Be, things musing
in a self-evident aloofness : openwork
or compact, absorbing the light into
our wood or packed together in our
stacked density.
They have something ill-at-ease about
them, Raf Buedts’ furniture things.
Their defenselessness is their aggres­
sion : They challenge in some way
through their dilapidation, through
their compliance, their powerlessness,
their timeless temporality.
They appear to hop, falter, stumble,
fall, lean and squat, but on closer in­
spection, these “outcasts” are
sturdily built. Their anarchy exhibits
an inventive constructive spirit.
Raf Buedts worked with wood,
with branches, planks, boards, sticks
and slats. He also used rope, lead,
canvas, silk, brick, stone and, in a
few cases, he included shells in his
furniture things.

He gouged, cut, plane, sawed, or
split the material, as if in doing so he
wished to bare the soul. The aim of
his handiwork was to make the matter
tangible in a spiritual-sensual manner.
Sometimes you have the feeling that
he would have liked to break through
its reticence, its taciturnity ; at others,
he appeared to want to keep them
as introversive as possible in a given
form. The simplicity and naturalness
of his furniture things are supported
by a complex substructure and inner
structure.
Beneath the plain oak tabletop, for
example, is an interwoven structure of
straight and oblique slats, rough sticks
and gnarled branches. Here, these
contradictorily worked elements gain a
cohesion that forms the table’s engine :
noiseless, stationary yet perpetually
running. They lift it up and keep it on
the ground. Rest and motion. Sky and
earth. Weight and lightness. A unity
of parts strung together or stacked :
imperfectly refined, perfectly roughhanded.
The idea of flying onto an undecorti­
cated stick : a piece of furniture for the
bird we all are in our thoughts.
It’s not art, says Raf Buedts, it’s just
some rubbish, a bit of firewood, it’s
nothing.
That’s the way it is : Real art refuses to
be art.
Its confirmation lies in its negation.
Roland Jooris

You don’t have to make much of an effort to imagine
a total reset of art history. A major disaster that causes
all artefacts of beauty and knowledge to disappear.
A virus that turns all canvas and paper to dust and
makes all the gigabytes crash. A new iconoclasm. A
war that brings about a genocide of our artistic civilisa­
tion. A regime that sends all art up in flames, like
the burning of the library of Alexandria all over again.
Art, as we know it, dies as a phenomenon and
becomes as vague a concept as god. Language and
the world no longer know words such as artist,

museum, painting, installation and masterpiece. The
gene that houses creative talent channels future Man
into creating amusement and entertainment. The
beautiful proves to be a physical formula, primarily
used to relax and pleasure the human race. You can
experience it with your ‘sixth sense’, a discovery of
the third millennium. Apart from a couple of anthro­
pologists, the world has long forgotten that that
formula once served to acquire money or prestige,
to gain depth or meaning.
And then this happens : In the year 4522, some­
where between the Urals and the North Sea, a group
of construction workers digs up a pile of artefacts : a
metal ladder, a stack of copper tiles, a cupboard with
traces of butter and beeswax. Will anyone under­
stand why the names Marina Abramovic, Carl Andre
and Joseph Beuys are etched into them ? Will they
understand that these are the prize pieces from the
S.M.A.K. ’s collection ? However genuinely lovely,
interesting or fascinating we might find such objects,
will anyone in the fifth millennium grasp the idea that
this was once ‘art’, always assuming the word still
exists ? Maybe not.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY
OF BEAUTY AND UTILITY
Raphaël Buedts and
the Museum of the Future

206

There is more chance of a group of archaeologists
converging on the remains of what, today, is the
village of Kalken, of their being dumbfounded by the
excavation of what is left of Raphaël Buedts’ studio.
The semantic confusion will be great. “What are these
artefacts ? Implements ? Was Western Man so clumsy
around the turn of the second millennium that he was
unable to make a chair you could sit on comfortably ?
A ladder strong enough to carry someone’s weight ?
A table with straight legs ? A spoon you wouldn’t cut
your tongue on ? It can’t be possible !” You can hear the
duty excavator mumbling, “Surely the West had far
more comfort than this ? They had modern machines,
didn’t they ? So why did they make such artefacts ?”
The Fifth Primal Element
You don’t need to gaze into a crystal ball to witness
the semantic confusion Buedts’ work causes. Even
today’s observer experiences a strange feeling looking
at his objects. For more than thirty years, he indulged
in a subtle play of relevance. The playing field was the
intersection between works of art and utensils, the use­
less and the useful, the museum and the living room.

That living room is omnipresent, as we can read in,
“All that time I worked on my interior / and neglected
my façade”,1 one of the many poetic phrases in Buedts’
work. Sometimes they appear as a title, at others as a
description or – as here – as a motto for a catalogue.
The relationship between language and object plays a
crucial role, which is also reflected in the simple, but
extremely carefully chosen, titles. Putting the names
of the (early) objects all together, they seem to refer
almost exclusively to household items : Cradle, Spoon,
Bookshelf, Bed, Hat Stand and innumerable kinds of
chairs and tables.2 You are more likely to associate such
titles with functional objects than works of art.
With a bit of practice and patience, you could
spoon up a bowl of soup with an object such as Spoon
– made from two pieces of wood and a mussel shell –
but it’s not really advisable. As a work of art, it refers
to a number of Buedts’ predecessors in art history :

the assemblages of the Dadaists and Surrealists and
the mussel works of Marcel Broodthaers. Bookshelf
is an abstract composition of wood and brick that
would fit perfectly in the museum. The visitor will
never guess that this work actually functioned in
Buedts’ living room as a bookshelf, unless he reads
the title. Although a title such as Piano Table suggests
something functional, on the other hand, the actual
object turns out to function as anything but a table : a
sloping surface, in which the abstracted contours of
a grand piano are distinguishable. At first sight, it
is reminiscent of the works of Jan Vercruysse and
Didier Vermeiren, for example, in the way these
artists thematise the sublime. Buedts had an enti­
rely different objective, however. Unlike conceptual
artists, Buedts also – and primarily – took inspiration
for his works from the material. This trend became
ever stronger in his later objects. They share the
interaction between concept and matter with the Arte
Povera movement, but are also reminiscent of lyrical
abstraction painting. In a certain sense, Buedts was
a lyrical abstraction painter who attempted to draw
the lyricism not from paint, but from wood. For him,

Tom Van de Voorde

wood was a sort of fifth primal element for bringing
us closer to the poetry of things.
In comparison with other titles, Table with Oyster
Shells and Table with Flowers seem to refer more expli­
citly to works of art. But these titles make one think
more readily of a still life on canvas than a solid object.
Strangely enough, these works are actually preeminently functional objects. They are ‘furniture
things’3 at which you can sit, work or eat with no
problem. These objects, which ensue indirectly from
Buedts’ training as an interior designer, are equally at
home in the living room and the museum. The same
applies to Table with Brick. The poeticism and whim­
sicality of both title and object are reminiscent of New
Realism. No wonder, then, that this work is part of the
Roger Raveel Museum’s collection.
The series Furniture for a Bird is the kind of work
the fifth-millennium archaeologist will scratch his
head over. The dichotomy between the artistic object
and the functional object, the useless and the useful,
the museal and the homely is at its greatest here. They
3. The 1991 overview exhibition of early objects, in Plateau, Brussels.

are compositions of branches placed in the country­
side and, in that sense, are evocative of Land Art.
There is a real chance of a bird coming and sitting
on one of these ‘objects’. But it is only by reading the
title that you realise that Buedts also attributed that
‘function’ to the works.
In Buedts’ late works, there is still an ambiguous
relationship between language and object, between
functional object and work of art. There is a series
of easels, for example : on the one hand, they are

209

abstract compositions of chalked, upright wooden
slats ; on the other, they are also simply the functional
object their title implies. A work such as L adder con­
sists of a beam placed at an angle with equally spaced
chalk lines drawn on it, a two-dimensional ladder
as it were. The series of works each entitled Cloud
includes an object consisting of a number of wooden
blocks placed on a horizontal beam. As the object
is generally set up outside, at first sight it looks like
an improvised garden bench. Another object with

Art consists of giving light to all manner
of things, even the most unrewarding
and miserable.
Jean Brusselmans

Drawing is an attempt at tracing a reality. As an artistic
activity, it balances on the firm desire to make a brit­
tle map of the world for oneself. The art of drawing
is an intimate version of cartography : The artist uses
simple lines in an effort to create order in his view of
the world. This can just as easily be the wide world as
a microcosm in which things evoke a personal fixation
– the way a person sees the world, experiences it and
regenerates it artistically. Artists who use the ‘small’
world as an alibi for creating art set the wide world

aside for the moment, as it were. They subject the con­
struction of their surroundings to microscopic analysis.
In Raphaël Buedts’ drawings, the artist’s environment
is the basis for developing a plastic language – language
that slowly departs from anecdotal themes.
It is wonderful to browse through Buedts’ many
drawings. Steady lines and the skilful brushing away
of graphite elevate the drawings to a subtle play of
lines and brittle volumes. It is like one big ‘mental
interior’ ; the observer requires little or no prior know­
ledge to place the drawings in their own context. This
is where their plastic force lies.
Buedts strove for art that elevates the small
artistic gesture to a powerful plastic universe. His
drawings are like X-ray examinations of rural life.
With their diagrammatic simplicity, they transcend
the borders of narrow provincialism. The artistic
motivation behind these drawings is of an essential,
anti-narrative form. Just as Buedts chiselled deline­
ated areas in wood, graphite masters the page. They
are formal records and distillations of observations
from the artist’s direct vicinity. They put right the
vain idea that art is the fruit of an utmost individual

The house is small, ‘typical’, with the roof extending
almost to the ground. At the back of the house, what
was once a shelter for animals and small agricultural
tools has become a studio ; the surrounding garden
could be called a vegetable plot. A goose is a white
speck in the grey/ green /brown of the flat horizon.
This is where Raphaël Buedts lived and worked.
There are clues, peculiar to the farming tradition of
Flanders (the western side is so different from the east­
ern, they tell me), that reveal the presence of ‘things’
that are only apparently functional within the system
of objects of common use : two truncated tree trunks
drawn together – one horizontal, the other vertical –
on which a wooden tablet vaguely marked with a white
line balances semi-precariously on top of a small wedge.
It does not resemble any known object, even though it

blends perfectly into its calm and ‘anthropised’ sur­
roundings. For Raf Buedts, it was a ‘place for drawing’,
a practicable sculpture : You can sit on the horizontal
trunk and draw on the tablet, while not far away a
horizon accentuated by an avenue of trees alongside a
canal provides a dividing line between sky and earth.
Yet, in this calm stability of a subdued and unhostile
landscape, everything is unstable, subtly unstable.
Raf Buedts’ works speak to us about this unpercei­
vable instability of the soul, using one of the few expe­
dients that art concedes when one wants to express a
feeling or a state of being : analogy (the other possibility,
used and abused in the past, would be allegory, meaning
a codified symbolisation – such as representing a lion to
imply strength – but this appears terribly obsolete, or,
at best, as in modernity, as ‘citationalist’). All his sculp­
tures are unstable, or better, subtly unstable : a wedge
that unbalances the entire wooden construction ; an easel
that could not stand up without an approximately nailed
joint ; a balance of wooden objects, precarious to the point
that it seems likely to fall to the ground at the passage
of a sparrow. This is the analogy I mentioned earlier : in
order to speak of instability, one is shown instability.

If even inanimate and usually rigid objects, such
as a stump of wood, appear unstable, then the whole
world – and to a greater degree, the world of sensations
and of human feelings – is unstable in the same way.
Moreover, the instability Buedts shows us is not imme­
diately declared ; it is something linked to the intimate
sphere of the person, by virtue of the linguistic choices
– or better, linguistic artifices – that the artist exhibits
in his minimalist presentation. The sculptures are
always on a human scale and all appear to have come

Marco Meneguzzo

from the studio at the back of the house, which meas­
ures no more than four square metres and is packed
with tools and small – extremely small – devices for
woodworking. Every product therefore bears the signs
of an accustomed operation, the traces of an original
dimension – both in a physical and conceptual sense
– reduced to the simple movements of an arm and its
tools. It seems almost as if his sculptures retain – and
echo – the individual sounds, well articulated and
isolated, of the chopping of the hatchet or the cutting

of the saw on each piece of wood and that these sounds
spread out across the surrounding land with the tran­
quillity and naturalness of a common, familiar noise.
Yet, as I said already, this naturalness conceals
something : that intimate uneasiness, the perception
that not everything is in the right place and that, at
any moment, something could disturb the unstable
equilibrium on which we have constructed our lives.
From his very first production, in the early 1960 s,
Buedts declared that the corners – also the metapho­
rical ones – are never at ninety degrees : This was not
about the sculpture, but about the furniture. Today,
both the furniture he made as works of art and those
pieces he made for his home are viewed as ‘functional
sculptures’, and while there is really not so much

difference between one and the other, it is extremely
symptomatic that, at the time, the artist saw himself
as an artisan producing his own habitat. Perhaps we
could overturn the concept and view his recent sculp­
tures as sublimations of that artisanal ‘status’ of which
Buedts was so fond. It should be borne in mind that,
at the time (the 1960 s), the concept of the ‘product’
– and even more of ‘production’ – was ideologically
disputed all over the world in favour of the producer
reclaiming the means of production, in accordance
with an ideal inspired by historical materialism with
a Marxist matrix. In this case, Buedts was entirely in
step with his time, to the point where he now consti­
tutes a strong example of it … If only he had known
of and desired it. Instead, Buedts’ production strategy

was not dictated by ideology but, at best, by a per­
sonal and social condition he chose for himself and
that chose him. In other words, in Buedts’ furnituremaking activities – here we are only talking of a few
objects produced over the course of a dozen years for
personal use – were not intended to prove anything ;
he was not crying out either against capitalism or in
favour of some hypothetical proletariat ; he simply
lived in accordance with the millennial rhythm of
someone ‘who inhabits the earth’. Naturally, no action

255

is naive, and an artist’s action is far less naive than
any other, as he or she, by definition, should be aware
of what he or she is doing (and awareness is incom­
patible with naiveté). Buedts’ choice was therefore
dictated by his close adhesion to a model that is not
ideological – meaning ‘superstructural’, according to
the materialist terminology much in fashion at the
time – but existential : when compared with Buedts’
work, even Vincent van Gogh’s early paintings, the
one of the boots and the one of the potato eaters, seem

analogy comes to the aid of critical interpretation,
demonstrating how the intimate dimension of the sub­
ject of Buedts’ work has its equivalent in an “intimate”
physical dimension. And the simplest ‘intimate’ physical
dimension for sculpture is that of smallness, of transfer­
ability, of weight being handled by a single person (not
even a particularly strong one) : It is not about reducing
the Farnese Hercules to a table centrepiece in bronze,
but instead about constructing a table on the scale of
a bird, about creating a chair that does not challenge
the centuries, but is simply party to our existence …
However, it really seems it was this focus on a
domestic dimension that was one of the various aspects
that provoked a deep crisis in Buedts, to the point of
lead­ing him to abandon sculpting for almost a decade in
favour of experiments with painting, which were, if pos­
sible, even more intimate, almost intimistic. When, in
1986, he was invited to participate in the famous Chambres d’Amis in Ghent – one of the most memorable exhi­
bitions of that era – his three-dimensional works were
directly confronted with the monumentality of works
conceived expressly for the museum (even though ini­
tially intended for the most beautiful houses in Ghent)

and realised for the event, while he simply transferred
what he produced in accordance with that intimate
necessity mentioned earlier to another location. The art
system at that time, however, also demanded something
more from those with a seemingly greater affinity with
Buedts, such as the Italian Arte Povera artists and those
who engaged in American Anti-Form. His work is not
avant-garde ; it is not declamatory or monumental or
even openly ‘social’ ; he uses materials, instruments and
means that would only be acceptable – in that moment
of triumph for figurative painting – if inserted into an
artistic context that holds its ground against the return
of ‘representation’ in art. Buedts remained, instead, as
far as possible from this polemic. More precisely, he
remained far away from this problem, as his sculpture has
an eminently existential rather than historical vocation.
It is individual rather than collective ; necessary rather
than confirming and its language is determined by a
tradition tout court, not by the ‘tradition of the new’.
The crisis lasted more than ten years, those years
in which there is a ‘black hole’ in Buedts’ public his­
tory, during which the exhibitions became few and
far between and eventually ceased altogether. During

that period, the artist himself questioned the art of
sculpture, substituting it almost entirely with painting
– painting that appears to have constituted a new
apprenticeship. His paintings of that time basically
represent glimpses of his personal environment, painted
with a realism that leaves no room for metaphors.
Then, life gained the upper hand. And sculpture
was reborn.
It was this regeneration, this renaissance, that ena­
bled Raf Buedts to critically consider the relationship

263

between life and art in general, a relationship that could
be defined as that between expression and language.
This is where the crucial core of his art can be found –
and the equivocations it has generated throughout time.
For its novel use of certain materials, his rarefaction
and repetition of symbols and his analogical capacities,
Buedts’ work has been read and interpreted as a kind
of ‘Flemish Minimalism ’, where the small dimensions
of the works, for example, should simply be related to
the small space occupied by Flanders compared to the

Although he grew up in Ghent, Buedts was partly brought
up in Mater (a village in the Flemish Ardennes) by uncles
and aunts who ran a farm. This is where his fascination for
nature and the countryside began.
The young Buedts’ mother, who painted in her spare
time, encouraged him to take up an artistic career.
In the early 1970 s, Raphaël Buedts met the poet and art
critic Roland Jooris. This was the beginning of a life-long
friendship and collaboration.
In 1971, Buedts started designing drawing tables and
furniture. That year, he created the Vici table, a “roundsquare table” that occupied a central place in the artist’s
home as dining and work table. The wooden furniture
things came into being at the same time as the purely
functional furniture.
His intense drawing work remained an autonomous
discipline throughout the entire oeuvre, though he also
drew on the wooden sculptures.
In 1986, he exhibited Furniture for a Bird at the
Wiedauw­kaai during Chambres d’Amis, the much talkedabout international group exhibition in various houses
in Ghent organised by Jan Hoet, director of the Ghent
Museum of Contemporary Art (S.M.A.K.’s predecessor).
From 1985 onwards, Buedts painted, inspired by
nature, while his sculptural production declined tempo­
rarily. To prepare for painting, he drew small sketches in
pencil and photographed landscapes and aspects of nature.
In the late 1990 s, sculpting once again became the
focal point. The rough wooden sculptures entered into
a dialogue with open-work pedestals, a series of benches
and a collection of easels.
When Buedts became ill, he no longer had the strength
to sculpt and concentrated entirely on drawing and painting.
The last drawings were applied directly to the walls of the
Den Bouw gallery in Kalken.
Raphaël Buedts died in 2009.

Letter to Raphaël Buedts, Ghent, 2009
Memories are scary monsters. They behave unpredict­
ably, restrictively and misleadingly. All the same, we can’t
do otherwise than use and cherish them. The contours of
a memory are like the pattern of veins in a leaf. It must
have been about six months ago that Frank Maes, my son
and I visited your workplace in Kalken. Or perhaps I can
better describe it as your landscape, the field in which your
thoughts and doubts sought their form, the place where
your art concealed itself in a chink in reality. It was a pleas­
ure to visit your ‘kitchen’, to be able to approach the draw­
ings, sculptures, things, objects, lines, shapes, stacks and
paintings on their home ground. You and Christine gave us
a warm welcome. It was a grey day, the chickens outside
were startled by a five-year-old boy and I was quite
drawn and moved by a tiny little sculpture on the mantel­
piece in the living room. The object is no more than
5 cm high. Near to it was a picture postcard of a painting
by a 15 th -century master. We discussed this tiny object.
You didn’t want to say much about it. At that moment, it
seemed like the centre of the world. Wandering through
your house from work to work, I was continually drawn
back to the unpretentious direct silence of this tiny stack.
In the meantime, I listened to how you talked about your
own work. Your words felt like protective layers intended
to allow the works to exist on their own wherever possible.
Your real words, though, were your hands and the way
your hands held a piece of wood to lead us confidently into
the thoughts of the tree. You employed no fancy words,
out of respect for the wood and its character. The things
were called what they were ; the eye focused on the experi­
ence of the hesitant, dormant beauty you had discovered.
In the way you treat (your) things, I sense a kinship with
the organic, artistic efficiency of some African ethnic com­
munities. Your sculptures and drawings reveal a spiritual­
ity, owing to the handling and manipulation they have
undergone. In an age that is being eroded by technological
speed and alienation, in your work you attempted to slow
the eye and slow reality. But back to that tiny sculpture
for a moment : perhaps it’s best to describe it as an amulet
that both puts art into perspective, but inevitably embraces
its history. I saw an object where geometric ambitions
were put into perspective in the interest of a vulnerable
humanity. The shape was in proportion to the surface
of your hand in the same way that your other works are
in proportion to your body and your direct universal

environment. And the landscape of this environment is
something we share. You were born in the town where I
grew up. I walked through this landscape at the time it was
already yours. Incidentally, last week I came across the
catalogue for the 1986 Chambres d’Amis. Your four pages are
bordered or isolated by Christian Boltanski’s and Daniel
Buren’s pages. There is no real significance to be found
in the chance of an alphabetical register. Nevertheless, I
found it quite interesting to see you sandwiched between
these two French iconic conceptual artists. The sociological
approach they adhere to is, in principle, an art that is alien
to you and that, for you, perhaps, alienates art from reality.
Philippe Van Cauteren
artistic director S.M.A.K.

Raphaël Buedts was like his work : sober ; robust and yet
vulnerable ; not influenced by fashion or the spirit of the
times ; present ; always plumbing the depths ; seasoned.
The work is like the artist was. For many, this book,
together with the exhibitions taking place around its
publication, will be an introduction to this highly direct
and yet contemplative work.
Like his work, the artist didn’t feel at home with the
sometimes slippery logic of the art market, let alone with
marketing or promotion. This natural resistance enabled
him to retain the greatest possible authenticity in his
work, though it also contributed to his name not (yet)
being found among those of the major Belgian artists.
This book and the exhibitions it accompanies are intended
to change that.
In the programme Partners in Art, Cera describes a
‘reference artist’ as “an artist with a high-quality oeuvre
who receives insufficient recognition in society”. Over the
past few years, we have developed projects with the aim
of supporting the work of artists who fit this description,
attempting to make it more visible and easier to catego­
rise. One of those artists is Raphaël Buedts.
We went quite a long way down the road with him.
Alhough this book was created and supported by a team
of people, it was always his book. It grew, slowly at first,
sometimes falteringly, sometimes in an unruly fashion
and then urged on by the burden of his illness. Raphaël
followed everything, full of the will to live and full of
conviction, looking forward expectantly to the result.
Unfortunately, death prevented him from experiencing
that moment.
It has become an honest book, fairly bulky, too –
solid (like a tree). It has ended up like Raphaël himself
– and like his work – only now more solemn. Surely it
will prove the initial impetus for well-earned recognition.
With thanks to the S.M.A.K., especially Frank Maes and
Dirk Pauwels, to Luk Lambrecht, Luc Derycke and Levi
Seeldraeyers, to the authors and to the many others who
wrought and revised the raw material. A special thanks to
Christine Couvent and, in particular, to Raphaël himself.
For his obstinate energy.

As an artist, Raphaël Buedts (1946 -2009) discretely built up an impressive oeuvre, drifting with ease between sculpture, drawing, painting; landscape, furniture-making and clothing-pattern designs. His
subtle shifts between abstraction and tacti­lity and between function
and form demonstrate an uncommon lucidity and rare poetic skill.
Published on the occasion of a monographic exhibition in the
S.M.A.K., Raphaël Buedts provides an extensive overview of the
art Buedts created from the 1970s until just before his death, including textual contributions from Lies Daenen, Roland Jooris, Luk
Lambrecht, Frank Maes, Marco Meneguzzo, Tom Van de Voorde,
Wim Van Mulders and Philippe Van Cauteren.

As an artist, Raphaël Buedts (1946 -2009) discretely built up an impressive oeuvre, drifting with ease between sculpture, drawing, painting; landscape, furniture-making and clothing-pattern designs. His
subtle shifts between abstraction and tacti­lity and between function
and form demonstrate an uncommon lucidity and rare poetic skill.
Published on the occasion of a monographic exhibition in the
S.M.A.K., Raphaël Buedts provides an extensive overview of the
art Buedts created from the 1970s until just before his death, including textual contributions from Lies Daenen, Roland Jooris, Luk
Lambrecht, Frank Maes, Marco Meneguzzo, Tom Van de Voorde,
Wim Van Mulders and Philippe Van Cauteren.